Web-based email providers allow users to send, receive and view email using a web browser. These services can provide users with the convenience of accessing their email by simply connecting to the network used by the service provider's hosting servers, or web-mail servers, e.g., by connecting to the Internet. Typically, a user's email can reside on the web-mail servers and, in addition to sending, receiving and viewing emails, the user can move emails between folders maintained on the web-mail servers.
For archiving purposes, the user can move emails to folders on the web-mail servers designated or used by the user as archival folders. However, users may want to archive or back-up emails on their local systems to guard against service provider failures and/or other unintentional or malicious deletion of emails archived at the web-mail servers. For local archiving of emails, the user can print the emails, and/or can copy and paste the emails into documents stored locally. While attachments that can accompany the emails typically can be downloaded to local systems, current web-based email systems do not provide the capability of downloading user emails to local systems.